[atlarge-discuss] Philippines question

["Daniel R. Tobias" <dan@tobias.name>]

Since I believe from earlier discussion there's at least one person 
on this list who's in the Philippines, I'd like you to check 
something for me.  I have a report that the GoDaddy domain registrar 
has blocked all access to its site from the Philippines, to the 
consternation of domain registrants who live there and find 
themselves unable to access their accounts.  This appears to be 
breach of contract on the part of GoDaddy (at least with regard to 
blocking access from existing registrants; refusing to take new 
registrations from there would be legal though still discriminatory). 
Perhaps ICANN ought to take action against them for this.

Anyway, can any Philippine members try this URL:
http://registrar.godaddy.com/
to verify that it is in fact blocked?

Yet another stupid blockage: Stargate blocks access to their site 
from MacOS computers, though it works fine from Windows based 
systems. I've verified this myself; on a PC I can get to their site 
with Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, and MSIE, but from a Mac I get redirected 
to a page saying that their system doesn't work with MacOS.  That's 
totally ridiculous; the Web is cross-platform except when developers 
go to great lengths to stop it from being so.  Does this break any 
ICANN rules by preventing registrants with only a Mac from getting to 
their accounts?  Anyway, if you want to test it, their site is at:
http://www.stargate.com/
(which actually redirects to stargateinc.com, which they're still 
using in all their actual URLs and email addresses, despite calling 
themselves "Stargate.com" [haven't they heard that putting dot-com in 
a company name is SO '90s???] for branding purposes.  Thus, 
ridiculously, the address of stargate.com is stargateinc.com 
[bringing to mind the old joke "What's the number of 911?"].)

If I were ICANN, I'd threaten to revoke the accreditation of both 
GoDaddy and Stargate unless they ensured access by all their current 
registrants regardless of country of residence or operating system.

-- 
== Dan ==
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/



---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: atlarge-discuss-unsubscribe@lists.fitug.de
For additional commands, e-mail: atlarge-discuss-help@lists.fitug.de